This is actually what keeps people using AI: variable reward schedule. It's basically gambling.
Literally putting tokens into a machine and hoping profit comes out. Amazing.
Bingo
Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
411–420 of 477 posts
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
Models hallucinate plausible answers to why they did things. It might be true and it might be complete fiction.
I'm growing increasingly confident that this is how people often work, as well.
All people at least some times, absolutely yes.
Isn't it awesome we built machine that does the exact same thing, but even faster and more often? /s
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#413> Why is half the site blue now? I asked you to change one button. > Half the site is blue. I asked for ONE button. Those are my only options when the site is clearly not blue, two buttons are. There is a reason for why I am much more specific than this.
Same, I don't get it? I think event Sonnet 5 can build reasonable-y decent software. I'm a little surprised with how many people resonate with this.
I spent 30 mins today planning a change that affected multiple modules, and then handed it off the plan to the Claude to implement, and came back to 4 PRs fully ready to merge 15 mins later.
1 year ago, this kind of work would have taken me a better portion of the day, especially given the amount of searching I would need to do to build context.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#414I just had a really interesting yet (funny) conversation with ChatGPT (5). We came up with this idea to make a custom "light box" for two Govee COB light strips which would enable both wall washing (leds shining towards the wall, to the top) and lighting up the wall panels and the desk below the box (leds shining to the bottom) using two led profiles tucked away in this construction.
Text wise it seemed it more or less understood exactly what I wanted...
... but then I asked to draw a simple ASCII layout so my DIY savvy but not really that strong in English dad could understand better what the plan was.
But every single time it got the orientation of the led profiles wrong. I told it the orientation was wrong. It understood that the orientation was wrong (it kept saying sorry even) but even when warned multiple times the orientation was still wrong.
I really wonder if Astra will be smarter than this, and if not AGI still has a veeeeery long way to go...
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
i’m not sure “variable rewards” is the right term, but i do agree with the op that it is very similar to gambling. regarding your examples, i think the difference is that with ai, you’re literally sitting in front of a machine, pressing a button, and (almost instantly) getting a result that, if not desired, can immediately be tried for again. you even spend “tokens” to do this, and at least in my native language, “to…
I don’t see much similarity beyond the most superficial. If you sit at a slot machine and pump quarters into it, each “turn” is independent. You spin and you win or lose. It’s pure chance and there is no destination. You execute the exact same action over and over and hope random chance brings you more money. If you sit down in front of a coding harness, the progress is incremental and directed. You ask for a thing,…
So maybe it's more like poker than a slot machine? Still intermittent rewards with a lot of random chance. The nuance of the analogy isn't that important to the general idea
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hacker News is the epitome of this! If you find yourself not enjoying your daily dose of "someone is wrong on the internet" (via the immortal https://xkcd.com/386/ ) as you find yourself crafting the perfect response, you can always close the tab!
You can, but this is public and maybe you should post. If "you are what you repeatedly do" then we all collectively are what we all do. If we each stop arguing with racists because we're each tired of it, then what we are is a society that lets racism go unopposed, a site with racist comments proliferating, a site where racists gather because they are able to be themselves, a site where future readers and AI training…
A few things:
(1) I admire your energy, but sir/ma'am this is a Wendy's.
(2) I am very confused that you thought I was talking about tolerance-of-intolerance types of conversations, when I was more intending to say "I don't need to write an essay responding to technical comments even if I think I have a different angle of technical insight than the commenter, and not worrying about that can be freeing."
(3) For posts like the ones you mention that do trigger the "tolerance of intolerance" paradox, sometimes the very "feeding" of a troll is what makes them feel part of a community, and refusing to engage can indeed be the right way to handle those messages, and the morally correct thing to do.
(4) Not to mention that there are many ways to effect change that are higher-leverage, and less wearing on one's limited stamina, than replying to every disagreeable comment on the internet.
(5) I'm not proud that I've written a five-point answer here. It has not sparked joy, but I've written one anyways. Do what sparks joy, and consider my reply here a cautionary tale.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#417This is an amazing piece of satire but it's really not so far from reality.
I've lost count of the number of times I've submitted a prompt to Claude, had it interview me about areas of uncertainty, iterated on the plan a handful of times and then had it one shot the generation of 1000 - 3000 lines of code and tests that work pretty much perfectly first time but then had it chew through six figures of tokens and achieve absolutely nothing useful at all on the seemingly simplest of tasks.
This site is clearly based on bitter and hard won experience with the real product.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#418Great site, triggered memories! haha. To try to add something to this discussion -- I think that while I've seen these sort of loops less --- what I have seen is "overly helpful". Models nowadays want to double-triple-quadruple check things. I'm being silly but it verges on "I have a working solution but let me write a variation in Rust to ensure a convergent solution and prove this works". I've had to stop models no…
I've noticed them repeatedly casting the same value to the same type for now reason, like I'd have a Python function with a type-annotated int argument, and inside the function it would cast that int to int, and also at the call site, just in case it wasn't int enough.
Your fault for not using a statically strongly typed language, haha. It thinks a type annotation means nothing in Python, and maybe it is not wrong.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#419Too soon.
Re: Claude, change the “Add to Cart” button to blue
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
sorry, maybe my english is failing me here. what i was getting at is that using ai feels like gambling to me, where tokens, time, etc. are wagered against the chance for desired output. the risk is that you waste your tokens/time, and the prize is a useful answer (if not the exact code/solution/whatever one was hoping for) i wasn’t trying to convince you, i’m just explaining that this is gambling in a meaningful sens…
I just wanted to chime in that there is nothing wrong with your English. I'm a native English speaker and I, too, find using an LLM to accomplish something to be very gambling-like. You're wagering something of value (your allotted tokens, and your time) on an unpredictable outcome that you hope benefits you.
thanks, i really appreciate the kind words. it’s just such a precise language that i worry i might be accidentally adding (or not including) important subtext in discussions like this